As many have already figured out long ago using that gray mass between our ears, that much-touted 2004 Lancet study — claiming 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths following the US invasion — has once again been discredited.

In science, replication is the iron test. I find it revealing that no other source or study has come close to replicating the original study. All my original points still stand.

And now, most damning, is a study about to be formally presented on Monday by David Kane, Institute Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Michelle Malkin has the exclusive preview.

Much of the math here is mind-numbingly complicated, but Kane’s bottom line is simple: the Lancet authors “cannot reject the null hypothesis that mortality in Iraq is unchanged.”Translation: according to Kane, the confidence interval for the Lancet authors’ main finding is wrong. Had the authors calculated the confidence interval correctly, Kane asserts that they would have failed to identify a statistically significant increase in risk of death in Iraq, let alone the widely-reported 98,000 excess civilian deaths.

An interesting side note: as Kane observes in his paper, the Lancet authors “refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data (or even a precise description of the actual methodology).” The researchers did release some high-level summary data in highly aggregated form (see here), but they released neither the detailed interviewee-level data nor the programming code that would be necessary to replicate their results.

Please make sure to tune into CBS Evening News tonight when Katie Couric will not be doing a follow-up story to set the record straight….

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

UPDATE (from GPW): Busy with schoolwork today so I may not get to blog, but just wanted to note that David Kane who wrote the piece debunking the Lancet study is like yours truly, a graduate of America’s finest liberal arts college and blogs about our alma mater at Ephblog. Check it out!

The Confidence Interval alone was enough to demonstrate that the study wasn’t, but what I want to know is how a paper without a detailed methodological discussion section got published in a peer-reviewed journal, particularly a medical journal.

You know what else has been debunked? The claim made by the Neo-Mods that we absolutely had to accept amnesty as part of ‘Comprehensive Immigration Reform’ because it would be impossible to get an enforcement-only bill through the Democrat Senate.

Well, lo and behold, the DHS budget passed by the Senate last night includes $3 billion in enforcement-only funding for the southwest border and no amnesty for illegals. The Democrats tried to block it, but the “right wingnuts” stared them down and won. We even saved most of the John Doe amendment.

I am virtually pointing at the Neo-Mod RINOs and going “Ha-Ha” like Nelson Muntz right now.

Assuming the President signs the bill, of course – and then assuming the bureaucracy carries it out.

They’ll do their best to avoid it. But we always knew with McCain-Kennedy that they were going to implement the Amnesty without the Security. And if there’s still only 13 miles of fence this time next year, we’ll have a brilliant campaign issue to beat them about the head with.

It would help that case if we didn’t have a Republican president who also supported complete non-enforcement of immigration laws. (But give an illegal-immigrant drug dealer a flesh wound in the buttocks, and he’ll throw the book at you).

LOL. go to this stats blog for an intense mathematical showing that Kane is actually not convincing in the least statistically. Short version: to have findings like he does, you’d need to have towns in Iraq in which dead people magically come back to life. That’s clearly wrong, so his assumption of normality is wrong and thus so are his calculations. D’oh!

1) In a shocking departure from scientific practice, the Lancet authors still won’t divulge some crucial details of their data-gathering and statistical methodologies.
2) In a shocking departure from scientific practice, the Lancet authors still won’t release their study data sets.
3) Accepting those handicaps, and arguing purely from such data and method as the Lancet authors wanted to put forward, Kane showed their paper is self-contradicting and hence, self-undermining.

As Bruce points out, many others have debunked the Lancet number in entirely different ways. It’s a sieve.

And I could not pass up commenting on this topic. There are a lot of problems with David Kane’s attempt to “debunk” the Lancet study. They are all covered here in detail. I’m not a statistician but even I can grasp the concept that the inclusion of the Fallujah outlier throws assumptions of normal distribution behavior out the window. Poor David – he’s about to present his paper to a meeting of statisticians on Monday. If I were him, I’d run over my allotted time so as to avoid the devastating questions that are sure to follow. BTW, David himself actually accepts that our disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in 100,000 excess violent deaths. Of course, that’s perfectly acceptable to the war cheerleaders.